A fresh perspective

The path from the idea to product market fit is very personal. It's the proverbial kissing a few frogs before finding the prince. And anchoring it on your identity is a dangerous practice.

You take every setback it faces personally.

Every limitation you face becomes its limitation.

Avoidance becomes the name of the game.

Too cautious or bullish in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The product or organisation inherits your insecurities.

Can you imagine the potter being so attached to the idea that out of the clay, he can only make a vase that when it doesn’t become a vase but a magnificent bowl, they declare themselves a failure without evidence and stop pottering (in the good way)?!

This almost happened to me. I wanted to do one-on-one’s or at the most, talk to single moms only. But I wasn’t doing as well as I’d hoped. Then, with one conversation, it morphed into an entrepreneur community. For a little while, I shrunk back into stealth founder mode. After all, where does a 55% introvert/15% extrovert/30% yet-to-be-determined-ert go to lick their wounds and ruminate? But we’re back at it!

That was my first encounter with the minimum viable product. The thing I started with was not the final product, it was for information gathering. And getting to product market fit (PMF) took a series of pivots. Public pivots, internal pivots, mental pivots! And, each one tests your resolve.

So before you walk away from it and go back to what you’ve always known, make sure you’re not giving up because of what seems like a dead-end. It may just be the point to pivot.

Maybe it needs you to look at it through a different lens.

Look again. Perhaps the apartment building whose foundation you’re struggling with is rather a parking lot (All Modern Family fans gather here).

My encourager as we kick off 2025, before you sneak back into stealth mode and allow that great solution or organisation you’re building to disappear from the history books,

• take a walk outside, seriously just go for a quiet walk outside.

• talk to someone slightly ahead of you on the same journey,

• come back and look again.

Then, let us know how it’s going? Where we can assist?

Your former-Stealth Mode Founder,

Nobulumko